DITA production (department)

Skills

Perl

PHP

Ant

XML

XSL

MySQL

Eclipse

JavaScript

Summary

Developing reusable documentation components for large middleware software products
requires an effective content management and build workflow. To author and maintain the
many thousands of topics, writers depend on the tests and controls of the workflow.

As we all know, when such a workflow lacks automation, the burden of these controls falls
on a few people who are subject to human error.

To alleviate that burden, I designed and developed a web application and automation around
our existing build tools. I developed the web application with the quality control measures
and usability features desired by writers and translators.

The system provided nightly full builds and incremental delta builds, building
every few hours and only when the system discovered files had changed in the source control
system. A colleague further enhanced the system by adding a build button so that writers could
kick off incremental builds on demand.

Despite its many features, it was remarkably easy to maintain because of its thorough
documentation and modular design, with a series of Ant macros driving perl routines
that interact with the model XML and SQL data through custom perl modules.